Black Ops and Black Ops 2 Developer Demands Activision Share Re-Release Revenue With Original Game Creators

“Wealth must be distributed retroactively too.”

Gavin Goslin, a Treyarch veteran who worked as a level designer on Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2, says the original development team deserves royalties from sales of the re-releases.

In a LinkedIn post, Goslin noted that the re-releases are almost identical to the originals and add no significant new features. Even so, the games, priced at $40 each, quickly climbed the US charts, showing continued demand for classic Call of Duty entries.

According to the developer, the success of the older games shows that today’s players still want high-quality projects like those released more than a decade ago.

As a developer who actually worked on Black Ops and Black Ops 2, I have mixed feelings looking at these rankings. I put my whole life into these games, spending countless grueling hours of overtime alongside an incredibly talented team to bring them to perfection.

Gavin Goslin, Treyarch veteran.

He stressed that he is glad to see the team’s work still popular in 2026. However, he considers it unfair that Activision and its parent company Microsoft earn substantial profits from years of work by creators who do not share in the income from new sales.

If executives receive huge bonuses thanks to the longevity of these classic games, wealth must be distributed retroactively too. Revenue from old projects should mean rewards for the developers who went through grueling overtime to create them.

Gavin Goslin, Treyarch veteran.

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